I’ve been a journalist for over 20 years. I began as a feature writer on the UK’s Independent on Sunday newspaper and set up as a freelance in 2000. Since then, I’ve written for many of the UK’s national newspapers and magazines, from the Financial Times and the Guardian to Country Living and Cosmopolitan, and I’ve interviewed everyone from A-list celebrities, businesspeople, sportspeople and musicians to teachers and teenagers, farmers and fashion designers, cooks and criminals – plus many others. I’ve also recently been back to university to pick up a second degree in psychology, because the human mind fascinates me. Everyone has an interesting story to tell if it’s presented well and that’s what I like to do.

Mental Health At Work: What Every Team Leader Should Know

Mental health at work is an issue for all businesses, of all sizes, from self-employed singletons to corporations that employ thousands. Speaking in Parliament in January this year, Norman Lamb, the UK Minister for Care and Support, noted that at least one in four people will experience a mental health problem at some point in their life; that many experience poor mental well-being but do not have a diagnosable mental disorder; and that mental illness is now the cause of over 40% of sickness benefit claims. The average cost of poor mental health to business, he added, is just over £1,000 per year, or almost £26 billion across the UK economy.

Patrick Watt, director of corporate at Bupa, knows more about this than many. Bupa is a leading international healthcare group which offers personal and company health insurance; it has 20,000 corporate clients and also works with 30,000 small and medium enterprises (SMEs). As well as looking after its insurance clients, Bupa also runs care homes, health centres and hospitals, and is thus a significant employer in its own right, with 32,000 staff across the UK. The company was named Health Care Insurance Provider of the Year 2013 at the Financial Adviser Life and Pensions Award, its fourth year in a row in the top spot, and is also the Consumer Moneyfacts Awards’ Health Insurance Provider of the Year.

Speaking to Watt, it becomes clear that mental health isn’t just his job: it’s his passion. “This issue is one that impacts everybody!” he insists. And surely he’s right. While many of us do all (or most, or at least some) of the right things to take care of our physical health, eating healthily and exercising regularly, fewer among us are as aware of what’s going on in our heads as what’s going on in our bodies.

Too often, says Watt, we speak about this issue only in terms of illness rather than in terms of maintaining good mental health. So: how can we change that – and what can business do to help?

Patrick Watt of Bupa

Maintaining mental health at work is a win for everyone: employees, employers, colleagues, customers

“Mental health is a topic everyone can relate to. We all personally know what it’s like when you miss the train or you’re late to a meeting – we all know what it feels like to be stressed and how it impairs our ability to make good decisions. And we’re seeing more and more businesses recognising the impact of mental health – 50% of all long-term sickness relates to mental health. Any employer of any size who looks at people who are off sick long-term will recognise this – and all businesses recognise the benefits of workers in good mental health, as they’re engaged and fully productive. A Warwick University study found that people in a happy state of mind are 12% more productive. In the UK, a lot of businesses are knowledge-based and the human component is key. Firms in centres such as the City of London and professions such as law and accountancy are seeing the potency of getting this right – workplace health can bring other competitive advantages. Maintaining environments where talent can thrive makes good business sense and early adopters of services that maintain employees’ mental health are seeing the results in employee retention.”

Businesses of every size need to get to grips with staff mental health

“There’s no question that, in terms of formalised programmes and organisations that have a strategy, it’s your big employers. But what’s hugely ironic is that the impact to business of health and wellbeing is felt more by SMEs. If you’re a business of 20, 30, 40 people, you don’t have the resources to absorb a significant level of incapacity – the SMEs feel this much more than the large corporations. They tend to have less structure and formality but they are better at dealing with this issue than we might think. We’re finding SMEs tend to deal with these things at a very commercial level. Take, say, a firm of architects – if a key architect is off sick, they’ll fund the treatment to get that person back to work. We should be doing more to support SMEs – they really want help in addressing some of these issues. But at the same time, we’re finding that best practices don’t always come from the big corporates. Some of our SMEs have some of the best ideas: allowing working from home, having fun days, encouraging healthy eating can have a big impact for a low level of expense. At Bupa we’d like to make sure that SMEs see that this is an agenda they can partake in.”

This isn’t an issue simply for HR: it’s an issue from shop floor to boardroom

“From my experience, everyone says ‘We have to develop toolkits, frameworks’ but companies have got to be much more pragmatic and start from the top. They have to move the agenda outside of HR, it’s got to be an agenda that’s led by the business – everyone has to buy in, particularly the leaders, as they are who people look to. The first thing I say to customers is how important acceptance is outside HR – and leaders acknowledging that this is an important issue. There has got to be greater openness about the impact of mental health at work – and there is still a culture of silence around mental health. If we don’t talk about it, we’re not creating an environment where people feel they can get help. It’s not about saying who’s struggling, it’s about saying: as an organisation, we have people with physical and mental strengths and weaknesses and we support them all. People have to feel able to speak to their line manager, take time off if they need it, access services. Mind [the UK mental health charity] has the statistics: one in six employees will have to deal with anxiety, depression or stress in any one year. Mental health issues are indiscriminate: it’s not about how much money you earn or how senior you are, and you can’t predict who will be vulnerable. Accepting that many people will need help at some point in their career is a great first step.”

Team leaders have a key role to play

“For people to acknowledge they’re struggling is a difficult step. It’s important to equip line managers to know what to look out for: see if someone’s performance changes, if they start coming in late. It’s not about training managers in psychology, but about getting them to lift their heads above the parapet and see if people are engaging. They’re closer to their team than anyone else.”

The trigger for action should not be when people go off sick – early intervention makes all the difference

“The two biggest causes of long-term absence are musculoskeletal disorders and mental health. Treatments are available for both, and those treatments are effective and low-cost – if they’re sought at the earliest possible opportunity. If you leave it too late, the first you know is when people take time off. People come into work with these conditions, but the trigger point for action should not be the point of absence but the point of onset. There is too much emphasis on using absence as the trigger point, and again, it’s important to get leaders to set the tone. The comparison with physical health is a very valid one. If you had set out to do a marathon, training for 11 or 12 hours, day after day, would not be the right thing to do! We all know that rest is a critical part of training but we don’t have the same attitude to mental health. We forget that rest is as important for mental health as for physical. Putting your brain under relentless pressure isn’t good for you in the same way that relentless physical pressure isn’t good for you. I’ve been in this industry a number of years and we have had a huge dependency on sickness absence as the key metric. But in fact there is a strong link between well-being and employee engagement scores. Looking at employee engagement scores is a very good indicator of physical and mental well-being. SMEs tend not to have employee engagement stats but in small teams, people will know when someone’s performance has gone off the boil – if someone is working irregular hours, has been prone to emotional outbursts. Sadly, I’ve seen a number of times when people have said ‘Oh, that explains why his/her behaviour has been off for the past couple of weeks’ – the signs were there. It’s not about prying. We’re social animals – it’s simply about asking if someone’s OK.”

Simple steps can have big effects – and quickly

“This is an important issue, not just for businesses but for communities and families, and there’s no question that we’re coming to a tipping point and businesses want to know what they can do. Very simple practices can make a difference and the key is getting everyone in the business to own this as an issue. Having senior people as advocates, promoting early intervention … there are lots of good examples in both big businesses and SMEs and simple steps can have a big effect. If you’re in great state of mind, happy, engaged, the world is your oyster – it’s about creating more of that, to make us a more successful, happier nation.”

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I went through a mental health first aid course, so that if a colleague is in a crisis I know how to deal with it, de-escalate, help them get help, etc. Even if they aren’t in a crisis, I can help them find resources for themselves or for family members.

Even a pesky headache qualifies as a mental illness of some sort, as it occurs somewhere in the brain and mental illnesses are brain abnormalities. As such, we are a society of mentally ill individuals. Sad but true.